Educational expansion has led to greater diversity in the social backgrounds of college students.
We ask how schooling interacts with this diversity to influence marriage formation among
men and women. Relying on data from the 1979
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N =3,208), we use a propensity score approach to
group men and women into social strata and
multilevel event history models to test differences
in the effects of college attendance across
strata. We find a statistically significant, positive
trend in the effects of college attendance across
strata, with the largest effects of college on first
marriage among the more advantaged and the
smallest—indeed, negative—effects among the
least advantaged men and women. These findings
appear consistent with a mismatch in the
marriage market between individuals’ education
and their social backgrounds.